For a television-based system, such as a digital television system or an IP-based television system, a television remote control may be the only input device by which a user can interact with the television system. Television remote controls can be difficult to use as text input devices, particularly due to the limited set of input keys that are available on such devices. For example, other than the various configuration and television-specific input keys, a television remote control may only have a standard numeric or alphanumeric input keypad that includes the numbers zero through nine to input a channel selection. A viewer cannot easily input letters for a text search in an electronic program guide to search for a specific program, music, television content, or various applications that may be available via the viewer's cable provider or other television system content provider.
A conventional alphanumeric input keypad on a television remote control or on other electronic devices, such as a cell phone for example, includes the numbers zero through nine along with the alphabetic characters “A” to “Z”. Although zero (0) through nine (9) is a total of ten input keys, an alphanumeric or numeric input keypad is commonly referred to as a “9-key” keypad. The letters on a “9-key” keypad are distributed along with the input keys two (2) through nine (9). For example, the input key two (2) includes the letters “A”, “B”, and “C”, the input key three (3) includes the letters “D”, “E”, and “F”, and so on with each consecutive input key being associated with the next consecutive three letters. The letters “Q” and “Z” may not be included on some keypads, but if they are, the input key seven (7) has four associated letters to include “Q” and the input key nine (9) has four associated letters to include “Z”.
Techniques are available to enter text with an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad, however they are difficult to enter text and in some cases, can require more user inputs than would actually be required to input a text string for the word itself, such as with a computer keyboard. The techniques to enter text and/or letters with a “9-key” keypad include multi-tapping (also referred to as “triple-tap”) and triple-tap-extended which are commonly used with cell phones to create text messages. As described above, the letters “A”, “B”, and “C” are associated with the number two (2) input key on the keypad for triple-tap text entry. Pressing the input key once enters an “A”, twice enters a “B”, three times enters a “C”, and four times enters a “2”. For triple-tap-extended, multiple characters are mapped to the number two (2) input key on a keypad, such as “A”, “B”, “C”, “a”, “b”, “c”, “2”, and the “@” symbol. Multiple characters are similarly mapped to the additional numeric input keys zero (0) through nine (9) on an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad for triple-tap-extended text entry.
Spelling out even a short word can require multiple key entries with an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad. For example, to spell out “CAB” with triple-tap, a user would have to press the number two (2) input key a total of six times—three more inputs than would be necessary with a conventional keyboard. An alternative text-entry technique is “T9” (“text on nine keys”) of which several variations are available, such as a technique to use additional, non-numeric keys to select whole-word choices from a list. Typically, however, “T9” selects a letter that is associated with a key input to spell a word correctly based on a likelihood of letter combinations. With “T9”, a user may only have to press an input key once rather than multiple times as with multi-tapping. For example, to again spell out “CAB”, a user would only have to press the number two (2) input key a total of three times (once for “C”, twice for “CC”, and a third time for “CAB”). The “T9” technique is not without its limitations however. Depending on the presumed likely letter combinations, a user may have to switch back to multi-tapping to create a word that “T9” does not recognize, or the user may have to input several “T9” key combinations to create the word.
Irrespective of the technique implemented to enter text with an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad, the conventional text input techniques are cumbersome, often require more key inputs than would otherwise be necessary, and/or require unnatural combinations of key inputs.